Tuesday, 22 May 2018

Christina new book is a sharp look back at her own motherhood, the loss of self that accompanies it, the messiness of it, the love of it, the totality of it, and she has started a Kickstarter to fund it. It's a book that is part of the wave of books looking at domesticity and parenthood and it's the only crowdfunding post I'll have on this blog for the rest of the year which isn't my own.

'For years I have been photographing myself in my life, through many ups and downs and normal periods as a means to better understand and see reality. When I became pregnant I continued to do so. My daughter was born in 2013 and quickly I was swept into an isolated unknown world. The loss of self was overwhelming. The photographs in this book were taken throughout the first year of that journey.'Back Born here.

Monday, 21 May 2018

Frida Kahlo gets a namecheck in Carmen Winant's excellent My Birth, a book which is about making the invisible more visible. It's a great book, a real 'why didn't you think of that' book.

Winant mentions the painting above, also called My Birth, a painting now owned by Madonna. "If somebody doesn't like this painting", Madonna said in an interview with Vanity Fair, "then I know they can't be my friend".Madonna doesn't happily lend the painting out. It doesn't get seen, so people don't have the opportunity to like it. The painting is made invisible, and so is childbirth. But never mind that. Have a look at Carmen Winant's book instead.

Friday, 18 May 2018

These are some of my favourite things at Photo London for no other reason than they seemed to have substance and soul. Not everything did!

Above is John Francis Brown at England and Co. No, I'd never heard of him either but he had these great little vintage dipytchs from the 1970s on a stand that was filled with a particular kind of goodness.

This is from Nikolai Ishchuk at Joanna Bryant & Julian Page, an old photographic paper object that is sculptural in keeping with the moment. It goes from solid, to ephemeral to monumental, the material shifting in weight the more you look. It's Alison Rossiter but on a bigger scale with a very different take.

And last but not least the beautifully printed and hand-painted prints of Vasantha Yogananthan at Espace JB. There was nothing that told more of a story than these in all of the place.

Now then, how to look like a gallerist. Gallerist glasses. What would I look like in a pair of those? Where do you get them? They don't have them at Specsavers. And the lizard skin? I'll need twelve yards of that. Dead eyes and a psychopath rictus-grin are a must. My head needs enlarging a little, and the suit. A gallerist suit? There must be a shop for them. Perhaps it's the same place you get the glasses...

The move towards directness in photography, and long term self-initiated visual research projects continued with Laia Abril's winning the Tim Hetherington Trust Visionary Award for her ongoing project, On Misogyny. It's a long project, she could spend all her life doing it, and her brilliant book On Abortion is simply the first chapter.

This award will help her fund her next chapter on Rape Culture. So winning does matter as it allows her to spend less time writing grant proposals and more time working.

On the same day (and rather overshadowing the Tim Hetherington award) the award for the Deutsche Borse Prize was announced. The most direct of the Deutsche Borse finalists was Mathieu Asselin who presented a new fifth chapter in his exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery. It is a work that involves deep research. In some ways it's not photographic with its emphasis on images that link to captions that suck you into the wider body of the work, and with a link to how the book and the images in the book have been recontextualised throughout the course of the post-project.

It was superbly curated, packed a punch and showed the human costs of Monsanto's activities and their links to the markets, monopolising, suppression of freedom of trade and beyond.

It also linked Monsanto to Deutsche Borse, the sponsors - and I did see somebody on their phone at the awards ceremony checking some kind of commodity prices saying, "this is going up, you want to buy this, this is going down, this declares its figures next week, they're going to be good, this is having a merger..." which was beyond irony.

But the winner was Luke Willis Thompson for his beautiful piece autoportrait. This is his response to the video that Diamond Reynolds shared on social media in the immediate aftermath of the police murder of her partener, Philando Castile. That video was filled with violence and mayhem. It's video as evidence.

This is film as evidence, but in contrast to the social media video, this is a quiet, contemplative piece. Curiously, it's the most photographic of all the pieces on show even though it's moving image. It's film, you can see the celluloid move through the sprockets. It has surface. it's black and white, it references classic studio portraiture through lighting and angles chose by Diamond herself. It's so photographic. the only thing that isn't photographic is that it's moving - a bit.

There is no sound, it's still, it's beautiful it exists solely as a installation piece, so it's not been uploaded by Thompson on social media as a moving image. Ironically, as a still image of the installation it's the hands-down winner of the best-looking image from all the four contenders, and probably the most shared. That matters. It shouldn't but it does.

“...the panel decided to award the 2018 prize to Luke. His singular and uncompromising portrait, made in collaboration with its subject, Diamond Reynolds, was conceived as a way to return agency to the protagonist.“As a contender for a prize focused on photography, the jury felt autoportrait imbued the moving image format with the singular and almost obsessional quality of a still photograph, drawing attention to its materiality, and challenging viewers to consider the personal stakes of representation in an environment at once intimate and collective.“Ultimately though, the project was felt to invite a timely and prescient conversation around the nature of image control, authorship and distribution in a way that expands rather than shuts down the debate.”

Statements matter and titles matter and if you have autoportrait as your title and are claiming it to be a very collaborative piece - and it is a collaborative piece - you do have to front load that. There does need to be some sharing of authorship in the naming. So it needs to be Diamond Reynolds and Luke Willis Thompson named as the creators of the work. And then that means the prize is shared and it can be autoportrait, because it is an autoportrait.

If you have only Luke Willis Thompson as the author, then any autoportrait is an autoportrait of him. I. I was with somebody reading the caption for whom this really matters and she was going through apoplexies at this. It's a simple indexical thing and people notice that. The title and the idea of the piece simply do not connect. Share the authorship and they do. Or change the title. It's very simple.

Anyway, titles matter, statements matter, but ultimately they don't. It's a great work, and you get the feeling all the elements that are mentioned above are in there somewhere, and obviously there are other things happening that but are not quite expressed as well as they could be.

Directness is good.

I can't help but feel like I'm missing something.

It's a great piece, never mind the semiotics. And that is the end of that.

Step into the exhibition and you see one space that is dominated by part of the collection of Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche. Gabriela has been a huge supporter of photobooks over the years and donated her collection to the museum - a donation which provided the impetus for this exhibition.

In the exhibition itself, you see her books both on the shelf and also on a table surrounded by bean bags, there for you to view at your pleasure. They are also housed in the museum library, so providing an amazing resource for anybody visiting the town. This collection has a contemporary feel so if you want to see anything significant that has been produced in the last 20 years, this is the place to go with both regular and special editions from Akina books, Reminders Photography Stronghold, Beijing Silvermine and beyond giving it a really international feel that combines with the idea of the book as an object. This is a place where paper, bindings, and touch come close.

Move beyond this and there for you to open and leaf through at your leisure, are some of Martin Parr's best 57 books.

On the walls there are presentations of works by August Sander. Henri Cartier Bresson's ideal library of 90 books is shown with his portraits of writers and artists on the walls above, and there is a feature on William Klein's New York work.

All well and good. I thought that was going to be it, but then you slip into the next room. Here you get a collection of photobook histories that you can look through and cross reference with the books featured earlier; global histories, Dutch histories, Chinese histories, Latin American histories, Spanish histories, you get the idea. You can spend hours on this table alone.

But if it was only about books it would be a bit limited. The Photobook Phenomenon is about how photobooks act as a focal point and sounding board for wider political trends. You see that as you head into the protest and propaganda section. Giant vinyls featuring images from fascist Portugal, from Nazi Germany, from protest books that run from Laura El-Tantawy's Shadow of the Pyramids or Veronica Fieiras's The Disappeared back to screen based presentations on Chinese propaganda and original copies of Willem van der Bol's Nazi Hel.

At the end of the room there is the centrepiece, a wall of covers from Der Führer magazine. It's a wall full of Hitlers. And there to one side is a veritable snowstorm of the 1945 publication KZ. KZ (as in Konzentration) consisted of pictures of atrocity from newly liberated concentration camps. It was a blunt and direct message to the Geman people of the regime they had supported, and the snowstorm represents the airborne means of delivery of the magazine to German cities.

The final room has another change of mood. Here things are more contemplative. There's a presentation of the post-911 Democracy of Photographs, and then we're into the contemporary photobooks with interviews, slideshows and books to handle from around the world. It's global, it's diverse.

I was hugely impressed by the whole exhibition (as were other people who believe this sets a new level for the presentation of photobooks ). There is a danger with books to over-rely on the books and the interest of the audience in photobooks. You can have too many books, as anyone who's ever been to a book fair will know.

Here the giant vinyls, the prints, the videos, and the text all lead into a fantastic presentation with a balance between the book as object, the book as information, the book as entertainment, and the ways in which it is a reflection and a creation of news.

It wasn't preaching to the converted, or even attempting to convert, but highlighting, through the visual, the lingual, and the tactile, the relevance of the photobook. You could see how this could be developed further and the avenues that were being explored, because this was an opening of photobooks, an engagement of the book form with how we understand the world.

Because books do reflect the world around us, and are a product of the world around us. In the evening I was part of a panel of speakers on the relevance of the photobook. I gave a talk on All Quiet on the Home Front - which is all about how my relationship with my daughter developed through the landscape.

picture by Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche

Laia Abril gave a talk on her brilliant new book On Abortion (one of my books of the year so far together with Carmen Winant's My Birth) and the process of making visual information engaging and accessible. On Abortion is a reflection of the world, a response to the misrepresentation and hijacking of women's control of their own bodies by the religious right and other reactionary forces.

A few weeks ago I asked some photographers, editors, and publishers about the future of photojournalism. One version of the responses was photojournalism is dead. That's it! Forget it, you're not going to be the next James Nachtwey, never mind that Time ran a whole issue of his pictures. It's dead. Photojournalism. Move along please.

But the other side of that is that photojournalism is in the process of redefining itself. It's become about working in different ways, representing events in different ways, and developing a new visual language. It's about enlarging the world and representing it in all its diversity and complexity, something that has been lacking in the past (and the present). That's something that is now being recognised. That's a start.

It's also about emphasising the personal, and ultimately creating your own content. Because why surrender your work to a publication owned by some reactionary conglomerate that is guaranteed to misrepresent that work - and in another section, undermine it completely thanks to the publication's editorial position (photography has always been the shadow of a liberal conscience in otherwise reactionary newspapers. It's the beard!).

In the mythical old days, the rationale was that you got paid for doing this and a photographer could get a good spread and the image was king. Once that's gone, well what's left. Not much.

I see Laia's work as being part of that new way of working. It's a long-term project that goes beneath the surface but also uses design, video, and persuasion as tools that connect culturally and politically to external events that have roots that go way back to broader historical currents. It's the new photojournalism if you like, a photojournalism which is actually incredibly more sophisticated and demanding than what came before.

That's one way of looking at it. If you want to be a bit anal with genres and labels, you can say it's not photojournalism - and in many, many ways, it's not. And then you're left with the idea that photojournalism is dead. But I prefer the other model.

Next up was Julian Baron who talked about his practice, and the ways in which the book can be made accessible and moved from the private to the public sphere. Being in Julian's company is like being in the presence of this amazing energy, an energy you always end up learning something from, an energy that is firing on all cylinders in all directions, all at the same time - in a lovely and very open and welcoming way. You also end up questioning what a book is, and opening up the idea of what a book is or can be, something that is challenging to one's complacency and so ultimately invigorating.

In the group discussion led by Jon Uriarte that followed, in which he talked about how books and their design provide an avenue into a different way of considering ideas, understanding images, and disrupting images. His latest book (which you can download here) is a case in point. It's a book that was taken to the street in Peru but is also a downloadable book that is free. But if you want to have it as an object you can buy the screenprinted cover, copy off your download, and bind it yourself. This was one of those rare occasions when the talks ended too soon. But that's a good thing too sometimes. Short and sweet can be good.

Brilliant is also how I would describe Julian's book-jockeying skills. I took part in a book-jockey duet with him. Brilliant is not how I'd describe my book-jockeying skills. My attempt was a bit like John Malkovich's first puppeteering performance in Being John Malkovich.

But the location was amazing, in the San Telmo chapel with giant paintings by Sert decorating the chapel walls. It doesn't get any better than this. This was as good as it gets. I take this opportunity to announce my retirement from book-jockeying at this dizzy peak. You've been fabulous. I couldn't have done this without you. I love you all.

Thursday, 10 May 2018

Life is a continual learning experience and I'm looking forward to learning all about being a book jockey, with the master of book-jockeying, Julien Baron (shown below installing ICVL's brilliant Cage installation in Bristol earlier this year).

Ok, book-jockeying, what is it? It's this! Editing from multiple books to music! I will the learner and Julian Baron the master I think.

Tuesday, 8 May 2018

Photographs have a power. They can freeze and isolate a person into a particular state of being simply by the visual structures withing which they're made.

Photography mattes in other words. This article looks at how the innocent should be removed from UK databases of custody images is a case in point as is the wider question of the UK's extreme surveillance laws.

'In the current issue of Photographies, Lourdes Delgado writes about this in her piece on the bias of mugshots, and the way in which the functionality of the mugshot imposes a pre-supposed guilt onto the person photographed; the very act of photographing somebody in a mugshot makes them guilty in other words. As a result photography is responsible for a huge number of innocent people imprisoned in the USA each year (a very conservative 2.3% - 5% according to the Innocence Project organisation).'

But photography can also work the other way and be used to romanticise and reinvent people.

That's the idea behind the 19 crimes wine. The 19 crimes were the crimes that would get you deported to Australia back in the day. Here's the blurb.

Flip the bottle round and you get a mugshot, an image of one of those deported. Load a phone onto your app, point the phone at the picture and it will come to a stuttering half-life on your screen and tell you the story of the man depicted. It's almost interesting.

The idea is men don't buy much wine, so butch it up a little and then they'll lap it up. So the men shown are real men, the tasting notes tend towards the macho, and we're deep into the mythology of the Australian Origin story, 18th century style - 'my great-great grandad was on the first fleet'. That kind of thing.

It's a bit shit really; the wine, the branding, the origin story, the augmented reality. Especially the augmented reality But you get the feeling it's the future. A bit shit.

Thursday, 3 May 2018

This is the last of the archive posts for ICVL, a short interview with Vicki Bennett for the Activating the Archive symposium in Bristol on May 5th Check out her multi-media videos at People like Us for a trance journey across the ages. And come to Bristol this Saturday May 5th to find out- what is an archive?- what is a photograph?- what does it mean?- what is the point of it all?

What has led you to working with archival material?

Availability and Abundance. The triple A. I consider what I do as Folk Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

How do you activate archives within your practice?

I source from both audio and moving image pre-existing material and weave new threads, creating patchworks. The only rule I make is that I am transformative, and through collage hope the audience see many layers and reflections in the results.

In a post-digital world, what role do physical archives play?

We are the archives, our bodies, voices, neural networks. The digital or analogue archives exist before and after us, we are the ones who activate them, move them around, present them, hide them, the medium isn't necessarily the message.

To tell stories of my tangential journeys through pre-existing media. We are all working with archives, since the past is every moment up to this time, that past sentence that you read is already gone. The key intentions of my work are to be engaging and transformative and to elevate, and I hope that I can do that with my talk. It hopefully will make you laugh in places too :)

Amak Mahmoodian will be talking about all this and much more on Saturday 5th May at the Arnolfini in Bristol in this brilliant symposium on the archive with speakers including Maja Daniels, Vicki Bennett, Francesca Seravalle Charbel Saad, Thomas Sauvin, Kensuke Koike, and Amak Mahmoodian.

It's a serious bargain at £25 for the day and takes place in the wonderful waterfront location of the Arnolfini, with fantastic food, drink and cake all available within a few minutes walk.

Wednesday, 2 May 2018

In 2012 Maja Daniels, photographer and sociologist began working in the Swedish region of Älvdalen inspired by the current generational shift, where negotiations and tensions between modern lifestyles and tradition - including the preservation of a strong cultural identity imbued with mysticism - represent an important contemporary struggle. Through making her own photographs of the region, and creatively appropriating parts of the archive of photographer Tenn Lars Persson (1878 –1938) within her work the community’s unique and mysterious eccentricity is reinforced. Steeped in both reality and myth, past and present, an imaginary tale influenced by language, mystery and local history quietly reveals itself through the resilience of the subjects, the strangeness of the events and the beauty of the land.

What has led you to working with archival material?

I often collaborate with my subjects but since this project is of a more personal nature, I searched for a different way of incorporating a collaborative element to the work. As I began working in the region and came across this archive, I immediately knew I wanted to engage with it since it has such a strong link to the same notions that had drawn me to and inspired me to begin working in the region in the first place (language, mystery and local history). I felt a deep connection to the work and an urge to initiate a dialogue with it.

How do you activate archives within your practice?

By creatively appropriating parts of the archive within my own work I bring new life to the work. It takes on a new shape and becomes part of a new story. Across time and language barriers my voice unites with the voice of someone who walked on the same grounds 100 years earlier. Steeped in both reality and myth, past and present, it is this dialogue that reinforces the community’s many mysteries and creates a distinct, timeless space within the work.

In a post-digital world, what role do physical archives play?

They create an anchored connection to a place or a time. They become something we can think with beyond the digital world. While they represent something very concrete and fixed, they are also mysterious and otherworldly. As they make us aware of our times and trajectories, hopefully, they can also expand our understanding not just of the past, but also of the future of digital and/or other processes and narratives.

Briefly, what can we expect from your talk?

You can expect to be surprised by how wild, strange and full of humour photographs taken 100 years ago can be. Also, you will see how seamlessly two distinct voices can merge into one story despite being 100 years apart.

Maja Daniels will be talking about all this and much more on Saturday 5th May at the Arnolfini in Bristol in this brilliant symposium on the archive with speakers including Maja Daniels, Vicki Bennett, Francesca Seravalle Charbel Saad, Thomas Sauvin, Kensuke Koike, and Amak Mahmoodian.

It's a serious bargain at £25 for the day and takes place in the wonderful waterfront location of the Arnolfini, with fantastic food, drink and cake all available within a few minutes walk.

Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Amak Mahmoodian made the universal personal in her book of passport and identity images, Shenasnameh, a book where the function of the identity images overlaps with autobiography, dress, and visual systems of control. A connected but very different process is evident in Neghab, a project where the unique and revealing archive pictures of Nasser al-Din Shah are revitalised in contemporary private, public, and palace settings. See more of Amak's work here.

What has led you to working with archival material? My connection with archival material is deeply personal. When I was quite young I loved to have conversations, silent conversations, with my family photographs. I loved to create memories within the photograph, with the person in the photo, because I didn't have any memory or at least good memories to awake. Old family albums became my magic carpet, I could fly with my family photographs wherever I wanted, with the people who I loved and was missing. In 2004, I visited the Golestan museum and started to work on my academic archival research for 2 years. Golestan Archives are in central Tehran, which was once a home for Qajars, as well as the king’s wives, Harem women. I decided to use some of these old historical photographs as talking points as they had unlimited things to say.

How do you activate archives within your practice?

In my practice, I decided to tell my stories through the others, the others who lived in the past and whose lives and stories still exist in the present. I looked at the archival photographs from the Qajar period and chose a number of photographs, which I used as masks.Which faces would have to be concealed behind these historical masks? I started taking photographs of people around me, whom I saw every day. In some photo’s there were so many masks on a face that I forget the real face. Archival materials mythicized the absence and presence in my work.

In a post-digital world, what role do physical archives play?Archives stay and move, they stay with many stories within them. I need to recall my past to realise who I am today, archives represent the past in every moment of the present, we breath the past and carry our archival memories with us in our daily lives. They never hide, they share. They build a bridge between yesterday and today. We can reframe our past to tell today’s stories, to explore the similarities and the differences. Above of all we listen to the archives to bring their voice to our lives, to tell their stories among ours, old or new. Briefly, what can we expect from your talk?I am looking forward to telling you about journey to the past. The past that once upon time was the present.

'The mask can hide the woman’s face but it can not hide the ‘truth’ which is behind the mask.'

Amak Mahmoodian will be talking about all this and much more on Saturday 5th May at the Arnolfini in Bristol in this brilliant symposium on the archive with speakers including Maja Daniels, Vicki Bennett, Francesca Seravalle Charbel Saad, Thomas Sauvin, Kensuke Koike, and Amak Mahmoodian.

It's a serious bargain at £25 for the day and takes place in the wonderful waterfront location of the Arnolfini, with fantastic food, drink and cake all available within a few minutes walk.